


so nice, named twice

by zechariahfour (sodas)



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Chinatown, Fix-It, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-09-20 14:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17024268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodas/pseuds/zechariahfour
Summary: Yut-Lung is barely twelve when he ducks away from his tutor in the market, runs three and a half blocks deeper into Chinatown, and throws his silk-swaddled self into a dumpster.--A snake in the grass takes a different trajectory.





	1. wastefulness

**Author's Note:**

> _The City So Nice They Named It Twice: a reference to "New York, New York" as both the city and state [...]_
> 
> i guess this could be classified as character redemption for yut-lung, which also functions as a remark on how an early salvation for him would have changed the events of canon drastically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> be advised, this introduction deals primarily in child abuse/traumatic situations. also deals with a lot of vomit if that wigs you out.

They want to throw him. Out into the street; the trash; the Hudson River—they talk about it amongst themselves. They even argue. They almost agree to do it, and he almost wants them to. He’s in the corner of the room, sitting on a low stool and vomiting into a bowl, while they figure out where to chuck him. ‘Chuck’—grimy word. Lowly. He hadn’t heard it before; he only learned it when they talked about where to chuck his mother’s body.

He throws up into the bowl again.

The heaving comes viciously, a violence inside him, which is one of the things they hate about it. It suggests his future, according to some. Look how violent. Look how dirty. And at such an age! The child is violent and dirty, and he will grow to betray us. Throw him out.

As they argue, Yut-Lung whines with surprise when no more bile will come out of his mouth. His brothers turn their heads to look at him, and he blinks his glassy eyes at them in return. One of the brothers swears. Yut-Lung can’t tell which one it is because he’s dizzy. Another brother says firmly, “Throw him out.”

‘Yes, please,’ Yut-Lung thinks, but he’s too worn out and weak to say it.

“He’s going to die if this keeps up,” says the brother. “Look at him. No more than a creature of famine.”

‘Yes,’ thinks Yut-Lung, ‘no more than that.’

“By now it’s a waste to feed him—he just spits it out like this. Is there even a point? For my part, I’ve stopped trying.”

‘Yes,’ thinks Yut-Lung. Slower than the dipping bow of cranes, he nods his head over his bowl, agreeing with his brother—or maybe it’s just too hard to keep his head up. ‘By now it’s a waste.’

“I don’t care where you put him. But he’s been doing this shit for a week, and he’s not going to survive it.”

‘Yes,’ pleads Yut-Lung, and that’s all. Let him die in the river. He’s been so hot; he’s been sweating so much; the river would be nice and cool. Ever since his mother—yes, for the past week—he’s wanted to be held, and the river could do that for him.

But Wang-Lung says, “Don’t be vulgar.” He crosses the room to Yut-Lung, who would wet himself in fear if he weren’t so dehydrated, and if he weren’t too exhausted to be afraid. Yut-Lung realizes this dimly. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he thinks, and blinks with his sticky eyelashes. Wang-Lung grabs his chin with a large hand smelling of cigars, and even then Yut-Lung is not afraid. “Why are you doing this?” Wang-Lung says.

Yut-Lung musters a little gurgle in response. He means to say, ‘I don’t know.’

“Disgusting,” a brother remarks, and Wang-Lung frowns a grown that thickens his lips and makes his brow heavy. He slaps Yut-Lung’s face. Ah, his hand is big. Yut-Lung gasps, surprised. His ear feels like it’s burning.

“Why are you doing this?” Wang-Lung demands again. “Have they brought you doctors?” A brother starts to interject— _We told you, the doctors said_ —but Wang-Lung holds up a hand for silence. “Have they?” he asks Yut-Lung.

Yut-Lung nods. The slap had startled him awake, but it’s already wearing off. He doesn’t mind the stinging now.

“And the doctor says you have no sickness. Correct?”

Yut-Lung nods.

“Then why? You want to die? You aren’t scared of dying?”

“Brother,” someone says, “he’s going to do it again,” and Wang-Lung steps back just before Yut-Lung begins another heave.

\--

They don’t even give him the kindness of the river. That’s all he’s hoping for while they change his clothes. They haven’t told him yet that they’re taking him out to kill him, but it’s an obvious thing. By the way, he’s never worn anything so rough and scratchy in his life. Not that it matters, at this point, but the roughness of the shirt keeps taking his attention away from the rest of everything—the final sight of his brothers’ backs, and the thin towel the servants wrap around his shoulders. It’s rough and scratchy like the shirt. He thinks about that while the servants carry him to the car and put him inside it, and while they drive. He’s just hoping for the river. That’s not where they take him. The neighborhood they bring him to has dirty buildings and lots of sounds and smells. They park behind the dirty buildings, where the sounds are fewer but the smells are stronger. One of the servants carries Yut-Lung in his arms like a baby, and Yut-Lung shuts his eyes. So this is where. It isn’t the river, which he wanted, but he can be held like this for another moment. He doesn’t listen to the servants talk and he doesn’t pay any mind to other things. He thinks about the feeling of being held while somebody walks.

They place him into the dumpster. They settle him atop everything else. He’s wrapped up in the towel, the scratchy t-shirt, the stiff denim jeans. He opens his eyes to look at them while they let go of him, while they stand over him, while they close the lid. He keeps his eyes open in the darkness for a while and then he closes them again.

\--

He opens his eyes. He doesn’t want to die. Mama, God, Father, he doesn’t wanna die yet, in somebody’s big trash can.

\--

Lee Yut-Lung isn’t sure how much time he spends pushing on the lid of the dumpster. It’s all well and good for him to decide he doesn’t want to die, but he’s been vomiting up everything inside his body since his mother died, and he can’t lift his arms without them trembling. He almost throws up again from the effort, and inside of his own self, he’s screaming. ‘Stop it,’ he’s shrieking, ‘don’t do it anymore. The doctor says you have no sickness. Swallow it. Swallow it right now.’

He swallows the very last of the bile his body has got. The lid to the dumpster makes a loud and riotous sound when it slams open. Yut-Lung grasps at the lip of the dumpster with wet, shaking hands, and pulls himself up to look outside.

“Jesus,” says one of the kids playing in the lot. They’ve all stopped their game, whatever they were playing. Something with slats of wood pried away from crates. Yut-Lung wonders faintly if they’ve all been hitting each other with their sticks, and then he realizes faintly that he’s dressed like they are. Another kid says, “Holy shit.” They look like older boys, or maybe they’re just bigger than Yut-Lung, and none of them know what to do. One of them asks it: “What do we do?”

Yut-Lung coughs, but he swallows it. He does not vomit.

“Well don’t get the cops,” says one of the boys, and the rest of them murmur in agreement. “Who got their Ma at home today?”

“I’ll get mine,” says one, and turns fast to run out of the lot, and two more of the boys run off together shouting about their own ma. The final boy is left alone. His sweater and his sunglasses are both too big for him, and he gets close enough to the dumpster to look at Yut-Lung’s sickly, ashen face.

“Uh,” he says. “You need something.”

“Yeah,” says Yut-Lung.

“I got a sister,” says the boy, pushing his sunglasses up onto his face. “Could you, like, sit here?”

“Okay,” says Yut-Lung. So the boy skitters out of the lot and down the street, yelping something to someone else. Yut-Lung waits a few minutes. His arms are shaking a little less, so he pulls himself over the edge of the dumpster and falls from it onto the ground. When he leaves the lot, he starts in the direction opposite of where all those boys ran.

\--

It was just after dawn when the servants drove Lee Yut-Lung away from home. The sun was setting when Yut-Lung left the lot with the dumpster behind him. It’s eleven at night when Suk-Leui demands that the other maids stop screaming. The brothers Lee hear the commotion drawing forward like the tide—and then, all at once, their baby brother is standing in the doorway. He looks ready to collapse. He’s glistening with dried sweat, dried snot, and the future fury of the dragon’s nest. Suk-Leui bustles up behind him. “Master Wang-Lung,” she begins, but Wang-Lung holds up his hand. The six brothers are gathered, seated while they hold their meeting, and they look at Yut-Lung’s little body, which he has dragged across Manhattan. His legs are trembling so badly that his knees nearly knock together.

“I’m not sick anymore,” Yut-Lung proclaims, and drops out cold onto the floor. He is declared to be a tenacious little bitch and is treated, most immediately, with a bath, and then with an IV drip for three weeks. Wang-Lung determines that if the violence inside his little brother can be wrangled, he’ll be a useful force to have waiting in the wings when his family needs him. This child of six, closer to dead than not, had simply decided he wasn’t quite ready. That willpower will be an advantageous quality so long as it’s under Wang-Lung’s control.

\--

Yut-Lung is barely twelve when he ducks away from his tutor in the market, runs three and a half blocks deeper into Chinatown, and throws his silk-swaddled self into a dumpster. The lid slams down behind him. ‘They can’t have known,’ he’s thinking. ‘I was so good. I acted so good. They’ll think I was kidnapped.’ He clutches his tutor’s wallet in both of his hands and burrows, in the dark, behind an apartment building’s garbage bags. ‘I did so good. I did it so well. They can’t have known.’ But then he realizes he doesn’t know how long he’s supposed to hide here before it’s safe to come out.

When he wakes up, it occurs to him that it’s fucked up he was able to fall asleep here in the first place. This is a cold unlike any other—sticky, slick, and jagged angles inside the plastic bags—it’s the worst kind of cold imaginable. The smell, obviously, is horrific. Yut-Lung feels like his neck is permanently crooked, now, too. But, this time, he’s strong enough to push open the lid to the dumpster with only a few tries.

He pokes his head out into the air. His pearl earrings gleam in the baby powder of pre-dawn. Both of his braids have begun to loop apart, holding shape only for their tight wind. The silk of his changshan is creased and filthy. Three teenage boys are standing by a rickety fence, just yards away. They’ve been smoking cigarettes. Now they’re staring at him. They stay staring while Yut-Lung climbs over the side of the dumpster and drops down to land on his feet.

Yut-Lung runs past all of them and then down the street, while the city begins to wake up. One of the boys pushes his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose and says, “I’m so freakin’ sick of New York.”


	2. next of kin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Motherhood and brotherhood and childhood are hard.

“So lame,” says a boy. His bottom lip is pierced, and he’s always sucking on it. Lao Yuen-Tai does not respond to what he says, nor to the steely click of his teeth against the piercing. He’s comparing price tags. The boy—only a few years older than Lao—knocks his sneaker against the rack of groceries. “ _Mama_ ,” he says insistently.

In a burst and a glare like a road flare, Lao hates his own mother. His pride as a man wasn’t hers to sacrifice, but she’s done it anyway. He drops a bag of prawn chips into the shopping basket—yes, a little like an old lady, the way he holds this. The boy whistles low.

“Feeding baby like that? Mama, it’s no good. Baby needs home cooking to grow up big and strong. You should learn about the kitchen.”

Lao cusses without meaning to, and it feels like every little thing he does whittles further at his pride. He grabs another bag of prawn chips, nearly popping it with his grasp, and pitches it into his basket in futile, pathetic defiance. He’ll only be fourteen soon—he hasn’t had the chance to be a man and he doesn’t know that he’ll get to. Not with all this jeering. He whirls off to the counter to pay for his groceries, slamming down his basket between all the good luck charms and lottery tickets. When he’s leaving the little corner mart, the boy with the pierced mouth calls after him:

“If you’re his mama, why don’t you tell him to shut the fuck up sometimes!”

\--

Lao gets back to an empty apartment, so he leaves the shopping bags on the kitchenette counter, along with a quick note. He tries to write it well, as if he’s the tooth fairy or a special dream. Then he goes back outside.

He’s home again close to two hours later, which is the right timing. His little brother is in the kitchenette, rooting through the plastic bags.

“You missed Mom,” says Sing, not looking up from his scavenging.

“Oh yeah?”

“Uh-huh.” He’s sitting on the countertop while he digs around. Lao glances at him, but doesn’t tell him to get down. “She left a note. Said please don’t tell Auntie she’s in and out so much and she’s working hard and can we clean up so she can come home to a tidy house. Which is such bullcrap! You know?”

“But I guess she’s right,” says Lao. He opens the fridge. The status of things hasn’t changed. “About calling Auntie, I mean.”

“Oh, please. She deserves to get walloped by Auntie once she comes back. I oughtta call and spill the whole thing.”

“’Walloped’? Who you been hanging out with?” Lao closes the fridge. “Crusty old white dudes?”

“Don’t be a dick. And no, I’m staying in Chinatown, but that wasn’t a slick way of asking. –Aw, man! She wants me dead!”

Lao looks up to where his brother sits, alarmed. “What?”

“Kidding, but jeez…” His brother is holding up the two bags of prawn chips, something despondent in his face. Yeah, he’s kidding, but Lao can see it—he actually feels unloved right now. “I don’t know how she expects us to get any bigger if she’s feeding us stuff like this. Or I guess you’re huge, whatever, but if she never gives me meat I’m doomed.”

Lao thinks back to the kid with the piercing, the click of it against his teeth, his shitty smirk and shitty words. _Mama, it’s no good._ Yeah, it really isn’t. “Can you get your skinny doomed butt off the counter?” he says, and he closes the fridge more harshly than he means to. His brother looks at him strangely, but slides down to put his feet on the floor without saying anything. “And I’m serious about Mom being right,” Lao adds. “Don’t call Auntie. CPS might come.”

Now Sing is grimacing outright, somewhere between a wince and a wounded scowl. “Come on,” he says thinly. He doesn’t want to be scared by that, but he is scared; and more than that, Lao thinks, Sing is mad at him for saying it. “Don’t even talk like that. Besides, Mom was just here.”

Lao rounds the counter, out of the kitchenette.

“And she’ll be back soon,” Sing says after him. “She _just_ told us that. Could you cut it out? She’s not gone or anything!”

\--

“Looking rough, my friend,” says Shorter Wong, and then he whoops at the look Lao gives him. “Whoa! Dial it back, dude. I felt the chill of death just now.”

“Would you ever shut up,” says Lao, but he’s leveled his mouth into a line instead of glaring. Then he looks away from Shorter to the toe of his own shoe. It’s peeling. He grinds it against the asphalt to make it peel more.

Shorter ducks toward him, trying to catch his eye. He doesn’t quite manage, but Lao knows what he must look like: that brow of his, often smooth, now creased above his sunglasses in a concern like brotherhood. His mouth, lifted at one corner, almost puckered. He’s trying to figure Lao out. “Come on, man,” he says, more softly than he says most things. “What’s up?”

Lately, kids all over these streets are calling Shorter ‘Boss’. They’re heaping problems onto him and he looks at every one of them and opens his arms wide. Lao realized it a while ago and now everybody else does too: _He wants to save us._ He scuffs the toe of his shoe some more, and he takes a breath. “I’m fucking up bad,” he blurts at last, and he does it gruffly. His voice is pitching low, and he realizes what a bastard he sounds like. “With Sing. He does whatever he wants. He’s out at all hours. I think he’s given up on school… I don’t know where he is half the time, but he gets mad at me if I try to grill him. Well, duh. I don’t like nobody grilling me, either. But I never know who he’s with, or what they’re teaching him, and I’m…”

Shorter is kind and doesn’t say it, but it’s dense and stark between them: _afraid._

“He’s doing all right,” is what Shorter does say, at length. Lao looks up at him. “Sing Soo-Ling… nosy little dude, from what I hear. He’ll get smacked around a couple times for it, I think. And that’s a good thing.” Lao is looking up, but Shorter meets him head on. Lao sees himself in Shorter’s sunglasses, and the picture of his own face is a humiliation, but he knows Shorter’s eyes are steadfast behind them. “That’s a _good_ thing, Lao,” Shorter says. “It’ll teach him how these people work, and how to work with these people. And that’s what he wants. That’s what he’s after right now.”

Lao stares at him with a pinched brow and pleading eyes. ‘How can you know that?’ is what he’s asking, without asking it, even as his lips part and then come back together. Even as his jaw clenches, even as his jaw shapes into the strength and pride of a man, all that he lacks.

Shorter laughs. “Don’t be so surprised! You shouldn’t doubt the boss of the Chinatown kids.”

\--

“Sorry,” says Lao, next time he sees Sing. It’s not when they’re at home. The sun is almost wholly gone, and the New York haze has burdened dusk with a sherbet-colored smother. Sing is walking with a loose little crowd, boys whose shoulders clip each other before they slightly disperse to prevent it from happening again. They’re only in the middle of their intermittent scatter when Lao finds them on the sidewalk with Sing at their head. He stops in front of Sing, so the group stops behind Sing, and Lao tells his younger brother before the boys that he’s apologizing.

Sing sizes him up, which sends Lao reeling. He rears back just a hair, the length of the beards young men try to grow as they posture themselves. His own posture has him raising his shoulders and his eyebrows. Sing _sizes him up_ —like Shorter might do to a rowdy boy. Lao doesn’t think Sing realizes he’s doing it. God, no wonder he pisses people off.

But Sing must see it for what it is: Lao’s pride, broad but with its head inclined. He’s putting it aside in front of their peers, in front of the few boys who flank Sing in their trust and admiration, to reinforce their scruffy brotherhood. And Sing grins at him. “It’s cool,” he says. “No big deal.” An olive branch: “Want to hang?”

It’s a weird privilege, to be afforded the change to chill with your kid brother. But it is one. “I’m free,” says Lao. He’s taller than most of the boys behind Sing. Sing is shorter than all of them. None of them rearrange themselves to make room for Lao to slip in, but Sing motions with his chin, and Lao comes to stand beside him. It’s a weird privilege, to stand at the right hand of your kid brother. But it is one.

\--

“That’s where you’ve been kicking around?” But that was the wrong thing to ask, or at least the wrong way to ask it. Lao didn’t mean to crease his face or his voice with incredulity. It miffs the other boys a bit, and Sing wrinkles his nose and buffs his toe against the ground.

“See, I knew you’da thought it was so dumb,” Sing mutters. He sounds a little bratty, and Lao feels ashamed of himself for making his brother act like a brat in front of the friends who respect him.

“It’s not that,” Lao says, short and gruff. His Adam’s apple has filled in way earlier than Sing’s. “Just didn’t expect it to take hours or be so often. You’d figure fortune telling is just once in a while…”

Sing shrugs. One of the other boys, Frankie Chiu, says, “Dude, you got no idea.”

“We don’t spend the _whole_ time _there,_ ” says Liu-Luk. “Afterward we try and figure out the fortunes...”

“I always want a freakin’ drink after I leave that place,” says Fei. And then all the boys tell Lao how freaky the fortune teller is— _You ever saw someone look all the way into your bones?—I feel kinda cursed but lucky both at once—My grandma would pass out if she got her fortune told by this freak_ —and Lao hears ‘freak’ but it’s full of admiration. Awe. These boys are head over heels for the fortunes they’re getting.

“It’s a trip,” Sing says. He hasn’t spoken up while the other boys have babbled. Lao looks at him and nods. He can tell Sing hasn’t gotten his fortune told, even though he’s visited with his friends. He wonders why, whether Sing finds it stupid or suspicious. He thinks back to the note on the kitchen counter, and Sing accepting that it must have been from Mom. So maybe Sing just thinks it’s stupid?

“Sounds cool,” says Lao at last, which eases the boys from their flutter. There’s appreciation in the purse of Sing’s lips. “I could stand to check it out. I’m feeling lucky tonight.”

Fei hoots. “This asshole says he’s feeling lucky! Come on, let’s go.”

\--

Getting to the fortune teller is shady as hell, which obviously adds to the intrigue. By the time the group weaves through two side streets, finds a greasy side door, and lets themselves into an enclave smelling strongly of salt, everyone is wired with an energy that has them rocking back on their heels whenever they stand still for longer than a second. Only Lao and Sing are immune. They move through the enclave into the center of a store. It seems to sell mostly plants and statues. Further along, there’s an opening to your typical seedy back-of-the-store type of pocket. It’s swaddled in the hokiest shit Lao has witnessed in a while. There’s the incense; there’s the tinkling of beads. The atmosphere is tacky, and Lao wonders if anybody else sees that, or sees why. It’s manufactured, he understands. A granny didn’t putter around putting all this together. The back room, and the entrance to it, all look like someone has taken magazine clippings of mystical places and taped them together in an overneat collage. It’s the most inorganic setup he’s ever seen, even worse than a white lady wrapped in bangles and scarves telling fortunes in her breakfast nook. But Lao doesn’t say anything about it, and he goes with Sing and the rest, through the curtain of beads, into the calculated weight of fragrant fog.

The girl at the back table looks bored, even through the curling smoke. Her cheek is resting in her hand and her eyes are turned low. Her eyelashes are like a canopy in woods: thick, vague, letting you do little more than peer at what’s just past them. The sweep of her lashes, the sweep of her hair, and the sweeping dip of her shoulder suggest that she’s wearied by her own supernatural sight. So this is the fortune teller? The curve of her face is long, and actually a little sharp, and Lao thinks of Nadia Wong, more or less a woman instead of a girl now. Lao was thinking this girl is young, to be a fortune teller, but her face is long like a woman’s. Then she lifts her eyes, and where her mouth is simply bored, her eyes are _sour._ Lao realizes that he’s looking at a boy. Not more or less a woman like Nadia; a _boy_ , every bit as young as he looks. Lao knows it because he felt it when he bought prawn chips for Sing: the dressing down of pride, and the expectation to traverse a state no one will help him chart. Manhood. What is its capital? Where are its borders, and where on its land can he build? Lao had been afraid he was the only boy to wonder this, until the moment he saw this fortune teller with the long black hair and the fake pearl earrings.

The fortune teller sees him looking. He sees the recognition in Lao’s face, although he doesn’t know what it’s for. Then he smiles, without teeth. He lifts his chin from his hand and looks at every one of the boys who have drifted through the beads. “What a crowd,” he says. He sounds like a gardenia: rich perfume, and both cool and lush. “Have you all come just to see me?” He doesn’t look bored anymore, unless you watch the angle of his eyes. Lao does. He does watch the way they stray just to the left of the group, uninvested in their faces or their fidgeting.

“Yue,” blurts one of the boys. “The fortune you told me came true!” His eyes have a fever’s gleam to them, and he’s raising higher on his toes when he says it.

Yue, the fortune teller, smiles at him. He makes the smile look so special, a fitted coat, warm and tailor made—as if he wasn’t already smiling! Lao almost double takes and he wonders if anyone else notices the whole thing. “I’m so glad,” Yue says. “I saw good things for you and I’m happy they found safe passage.”

There’s a murmur, as if it’s good fortune just to listen in on that. Yue sets his chin in his hand again, but he’s still smiling while he does it. The pose fits the scene. He’s as lucky and lovely as the long, sleek ears of a rabbit. He can’t be more than fifteen years old, _if_ he’s even that, but he tilts his head like ladies on TV do. “Yue,” someone else starts, but the beads behind them all start jostling, and everyone turns around. One of their friends is coming through, announcing:

“Did it start yet? I found Shorter Wong on the way! He said, what the hell, he wanted to come see it too.”

And Shorter parts the curtain of beads with his hand, and the fortune teller Yue lifts his face from his hand, a little peeved at being interrupted—nobody notices—Shorter is wearing his sunglasses even in the low light and through all the incense smoke—he pushes the glasses up onto his forehead, looking past everybody, and laughs with shock. “Holy crap! It’s the dumpster princess!”

Sing cusses out loud.  


	3. serendipity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If the world were fair at all, a boy in cheap sunglasses wouldn’t have spent years thinking of him as the princess of a greasy New York dumpster.

The lot of them are watching Shorter. He’s expressive enough to captivate the moment. Just _look_ at him—his teeth, boyish and a little big! The rise of his nose and how he pales in surprise and then flushes in his laughter! Watch how high his eyebrows raise! Even if he hadn’t exclaimed what he just did, you can’t help but look at him. They’d tell stories about the moment later on even if he hadn’t said what he did. And yet he did say it, just now: “The dumpster princess!” And it all amounts to so much that nobody notices when Sing cusses in Shorter’s wake. In the same way, nobody sees the wretched grimace that tears across the fortune teller's face: the baring of teeth, the furious pallor of silky cheeks. Nobody sees it but Sing, the swear still bitter in his mouth, while he looks past the shoulders of all the other boys. _Ugly!_ he thinks. He would laugh if this didn’t have the potential to fast become a shitshow. The fortune teller would throw something at him, but he still would have laughed and let him know how ugly the grimace looks. Instead, with Shorter’s ringing exclamation, and Yue’s quick curdle, Sing feels anxious.

Yue’s face smooths over just before a real clamor can start. Sing watches that too. It’s another thing that makes him feel anxious: the way Yue’s face works, and what it reveals about his insides. Yue likes to think it doesn’t reveal much, but to Sing, it says a lot. The grimace: Sing feels sure that the fortune teller Yue has murdered somebody at least once. The smoothing: Yue is such a liar, and a great one. And sometimes Yue smiles and it makes Sing want to tell him to stop acting like a grownup; and sometimes Yue looks so sad that Sing feels afraid. He’s afraid of not knowing what to do. How can he bring the boys of Chinatown together if he doesn’t know what to do for a skinny fortune teller?

\--

He isn’t a fortune teller, by the way.

Sing has said it to Yue’s face: “The fortune teller thing doesn’t work for you at all. So over-the-top. It’s really lame.”

“Don’t be disrespectful,” Yue said. He put a lovely little bell at the base of his braid, getting ready to tell fortunes.

“I don’t mean it like that. I just figured you’d be doing something different. The other stuff you do suits you better.”

Yue had laughed. “The other stuff? Sing, you’re such a kid.”

Sing felt afraid. He never knows what to do with this person.

\--

With the bell at his braid, with the ropes of beads at the mouth of the room, the fortune teller Yue’s face smooths over just before a real clamor can start. Some of the boys have opened their mouths to crow or question, but Yue speaks first. “I won’t sit here and be insulted.” He isn’t cold like ice, but hard and beautiful like crystal. If you chip him, you’ll owe an awful debt. Everyone’s heads turn toward him, and then everyone’s heads turn back to Shorter. They’re staring at him. He puts up his hands.

“Whoa!” he says. “Okay, hold up. I didn’t…” He sees it in Yue, the thing Yue wants to show to everyone in this room: the crystalline hardness, but the vulnerability just below its facets. A sadness and a hurt. His heart, that is. His pride and feelings.

Sing wants to gag. Total bullcrap. Yue is pissed, that’s what he is.

“But you are, aren’t you?” Shorter’s still going. Shorter _always_ keeps going; he’s headstrong like that. He’s strong like that… “From, like, a few years ago, when I seen you—”

It’s in the crystal of Yue’s face. It’s like a butterfly knife. Sing opens his mouth to yell at Yue, to yell the other name he knows him by, because he’s _certain_ now that Yue has killed people before and he thinks he’ll see Yue try to do it again now. Probably he’d get hurt trying, because he’s just as pretty and slender as a crane, and nobody like that could surpass the strength of Shorter’s arms. But—and Sing realizes it in the instant he can feel blood draining from his face—he doesn’t want Yue to get hurt doing anything. He’s about to yell, _Joek-Si, don’t_ , even though he thinks Yue would try to murder him instead if he called that name out here. So he says the second thing he thinks of: “Shorter, cut it out!” And he doesn’t know why he found that preferable to being murdered before it came out of his mouth.

_Every_ head turns to him. Most eyebrows are raised; some are furrowed. Yue is making the ugliest face Sing has ever seen him make, and Shorter’s mouth is round and almost puckered in interest and surprise.

“Hold up,” Shorter says again. He’s dead serious and Sing wants to be even deader. “Why don’t we take a minute—”

But Yue cries, “How about not. _Ceot siu geoi seng!_ 1 Just go, all of you!” He looks like he’s about to burst into tears, now that everybody’s watching him, and Sing thinks it’s total crap but he’s too preoccupied with his own mortification to worry about a cat like Yue crying over a dead mouse. Meanwhile, everyone is so used to hearing that mouthful ringing from their moms or grandmas that they’re each shifting anxiously from foot to foot.

Now Shorter levels his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. He cuffs his own chin, tilting it upright, clearly the head of this party whether Yue likes it or not. “Fair enough,” he says. He takes his boys outside and the clicking of all those beads follow after them, and maybe, the boys murmur, a curse comes along too. But they don’t hear Yue doing or saying anything. Nothing is breaking behind them; no arcane words float out toward their backs. If Yue is cursing them, he’s doing it privately.

\--

Someone did notice Sing’s cussing. Someone did notice the ugly looks on Yue’s face. Lao doesn’t know what any of it means, and Sing doesn’t want him to. That’s obvious enough. While the back of Lao’s throat curdles, he thinks about the shitty note he pretended to write from their mother. Her ins and outs, her days without showing up. He thinks of Sing being so much smaller than himself even if he’s not too much younger—he thinks of their close age and how, even with their little gap, Mom calls Lao the man of the house and asks him, just between the two of them, to look after the kid. And he thinks, ‘Who raised you to be such a liar?’ Did Lao do that?

Shorter sent everyone home. Said he had to have a talk with little man over here. Didn’t say it unkindly, but anyone would fear for Sing, hearing that—or if they don’t fear, they must be excited to hear about the pulp he’ll be pummeled into later on. But Lao doesn’t go home. He hangs back just enough to gauge where the scene might go. Shorter is Lao’s best friend, and he could easily lay Sing out in black and blue. Lao doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to take the hits for Sing, whether he’s supposed to hit Shorter instead, or whether he’s just supposed to beg on his brother’s behalf. There it is: his budding pride as a budding man, nixed again by their absent mother. He’s getting ready, through the rising sting, to lower himself before Shorter. But Sing gets there first.

"Sh-Shorter, I am _so_ —” Sing begins to drop to his knees, preparing to bow as low as he can in total penance—he learned that word from the fortune teller they've just left behind. He thought it sounded pretty until Yue told him what it meant. Shorter grabs the back of Sing's shirt before he can make it to the ground, and yanks him upright nearly by the scruff of his neck.

"It's cool," he says, which is not what Sing expected. Lao didn’t expect it, either. And then: "Something's up, right?"

It's why everybody loves Shorter Wong. It's why he leads all that he does.

“The fortune teller,” Sing begins. Then his eyes dart around. “I don’t know if he really is the… what you called him.”

“Dumpster princess. C’mon, little man, he ain’t gonna put a curse on me.”

“No, I know.”

Shorter looks him over in another sweep, then ascertains, “But you know him.”

Sing makes a face, not wanting to give it up; so he gives up just a piece. “A little,” he admits.

“Got it.” But Shorter doesn’t ask from where. He sticks his hands into his pockets and slouches. “You think I should apologize?”

Sing is quick to change his head, and not because of how much he adores Shorter. Lao can spot the difference from where he stands. “He doesn’t need it,” Sing says with the honesty plain in his face and his mouth. “Sometimes you got to rib him a little bit.” And Shorter nods. Sing frowns. “You got to remind him that he’s in front of you,” he says, trying to figure out how to word it as he goes. “’Cause he acts a lot like he’s in a castle. Or like he belongs in one.”

“A princess,” Shorter confirms.

“Maybe. Like, sometimes I think maybe. But then he does or says some crappy thing and I get it. He’s a lot like us.”

“Yeah. I think I can get what you mean.” Shorter settles his mouth and chews on the inside of his lower lip. Lao sees, plain as Sing’s honesty, the conviction in Shorter’s face, and Lao realizes, all at once, that Sing is going to tell Shorter what’s going on before he tells Lao. In the next instant, he realizes that Shorter is going to teach Sing about being at the head of the table. And Lao doesn’t know anything about princesses or mystics; nothing about good fortune or leadership, either. But he knows he’s seeing something he will never be a part of.

Shorter asks Sing, “Then why don’t you want to tell me more about him?” He doesn’t ask it roughly.

Weirdly, Sing blushes. Lao’s face goes hard when he sees it, but Shorter doesn’t budge at the prickling crosshatch of Sing’s cheeks. “Kinda,” he says. “But there’s other stuff. Like, I think he’d bury me if I talked too much about him, but I think he needs somebody, too.”

Shorter scratches his cheek. “Yeah. So do I.”

Lao is about to walk forward and retrieve his little brother from his boss, but Sing opens his big mouth again. “How did you even recognize him? I mean, if it’s really him, if he’s really from the dumpster.”

“Aw, you shoulda seen it.” Shorter’s grinning in a measured way, real but rueful, too. “He climbed out of this dumpster like a little champ. Well, I thought he was a girl! We all did. He was beautiful, and I got no trouble saying it. But he made the shittiest face I ever seen when he pulled himself up out of that thing. I could never forget it. Just this massively shitty face, with his hair pulled back from his forehead and frizzing out like real old silk, and these big fake pearl earrings… The ugliest beautiful girl I ever seen, I mean it. Except I guess he wasn’t a girl.”

Sing tries to laugh. Lao notices the effort. “You sound in love with the legend of the dumpster princess,” he says.

“Well, yeah,” says Shorter. “Me and everyone who seen it was. I dreamed of her for months!”

\--

The medicine seller never sits up straight. Yut-Lung doesn’t remember the last time he saw her stand, although she must; she ends up in different spots around the shop, at times. They call it the shop, and not an apartment, even the places where they sleep or eat their food. Yut-Lung cooks for her; he washes her face with cloths and handmade soap; he does this all for her within the shop. The medicine seller is older than anybody else Yut-Lung has ever seen—even his father. And he remembers his father seeming as old as the ancient vases in the Hong Kong halls of the Lees. Even so, the medicine seller will frighten you if you call her Grandma. You have to call her Auntie. Yut-Lung knows this because she made him break out in hives by hiding herbs in the wash when he did her laundry, last time he called her Grandma. Heinous old bat—she seemed immune to it, but his hands and his arms burned for days. Though, he understood later, it was just a much a lesson in medicine as in her bridled anger.

The medicine seller never sits up straight because she’s nearly doubled over. Yut-Lung asked her once why she was such a cripple if her medicines worked so well, and she bared her few remaining teeth at him, but he was too far away for her to hit. He hadn’t meant it when he said it. Her medicines do work, and he knows the reason she’s crippled is because she’s fantastically old. She probably does owe it to the leaves she works with.

The medicine seller gave Yut-Lung a bed three months after he had run away from the Lees. She will not admit to thinking fondly of the shaking creature who was wracked with fever and whooping cough, undersized, swaddled in an old woman’s arms. The woman was dressed like a dowdy housemaid and she talked in hushed Chinese, as if she wasn’t meant to exist where she was standing. She laid the boy at the medicine seller’s feet and paid her handsomely. The medicine seller turned away her face and spat, saying she had never wanted a child and wouldn’t start wanting one now. But the old housemaid piled money into her lap. “Please, Aunt,” said the housemaid.

The medicine seller looked upon her niece, her blood relative, the daughter of her dead sister. Suk-Leui had worked hard for the powerful Lee family for forty years, and earned many of her relatives passage from Hong Kong for it. It was likely a piece of her earnings that had brought the medicine seller over as well. And still she placed money into her aunt’s lap.

The medicine pushed much of the money from her lap onto the floor. She kept only a little of it. “Fine,” said the medicine seller. “I will take the boy. Where did you get this creature, Suk-Leui?”

“From the trash,” said Suk-Leui. She had found Yut-Lung within weeks of his disappearance, and had managed to keep an eye on him in secret. This, she knew, would have to be the last of the attention she could give him.

The medicine seller taught the boy to sell medicine as well. Then she taught him to make it. Then she taught him more and more. Tonight, she intends to teach him about different cactus blooms, as well as their flesh. She calls him: “Joek-Si!”

“Yes, Auntie,” says Yut-Lung from across the shop. He’s making her bed. She must sleep there, for he finds it rumpled and in need of washing, but he has never seen it; he’s only watched her doze in one of her chairs.

“You smell of curses.”

“I know, Auntie.” Yut-Lung stuffs her pillow into its pillowcase, hoping she gets a nerve-rending kink in her neck from it. He drops it onto her bed, stares at it, and then picks it up and fluffs it. “You don’t like the fortune telling. Well, it’s good for business.”

“Not that,” says the medicine seller: _pah_. He doesn’t have to see her waving her hand to know she’s doing it. “You smell of _real_ curses. Not your fake ones.”

“My curses aren’t fake.” He sticks his head out to where she can see it, if she can even see with her ancient eyes. Sometimes he wonders. “Just wait. You’ll feel one soon.”

They’re only teasing each other, because they love each other. And as she loves him, she says this seriously, no teasing: “Joek-Si. I need you to be better to yourself. The curse will be treating you unkindly.”

Yut-Lung doesn’t smile at her. He doesn’t blush or look flattered by her love, either. Instead, he denies that it’s there. “I’m well aware of my own curses,” he tells her crisply. As if to prove it, a feather from her pillow pierces outward and then into his finger. He swears thinly, not caring if the medicine seller hears it, and the littlest blot of blood shows up on the white of her pillow. He plucks the feather from the pillow and holds it against his bleeding finger, watching the red swell of his bloodline’s wasted efforts. “And they’ve always been unkind,” he calls to the medicine seller. He is fourteen years old, and is convinced he has never known kindness. If the world were fair at all, a boy in cheap sunglasses wouldn’t have spent years thinking of him as the princess of a greasy New York dumpster.

Once he has made the medicine seller’s bed, he puts away his own things: calligraphy practice, the incense he’s been practicing to make, and a cheap, dog-eared notebook. The notebook is full of all the tutoring he’s been giving Sing Soo-Ling, mostly English: grammar, spelling, the works. Yut-Lung shoves it into a drawer. He decides that he hopes Sing will be too embarrassed to ever come back and sit with him at his desk with a pencil behind his ear and all the livelihood of his attention. “Damn it,” Yut-Lung says to his own curse, “why can’t you go and follow him around for a while!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¹[出少句聲 ](http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/words/55862/)


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